Brouhaha about social search in Google - Did Gizmodo miss the point?

As the amount of information on the Internet increases, it is not possible to keep up.  The ideal strategy to manage this information overload is to create filters that will increase the signal:noise ratio.  In addition the quality and usefulness of information is often related to the person creating or curating it.  Thus knowing who is the person/s behind the information can help appraise the information more critically.

Social search is a way to implement this. Thus you can for example when surfing the web, see what your Facebook friend thought of a particular article or post.  If you know this FB friend well enough, it gives you a special insight into how to appraise that article.  Here is a blog by the Bing team (almost a year back) about personalized search results based on FB "likes"

Recently Google announced that it will integrate their G+ information with Google Search.  The thought being that when you search for something, you can have the option of seeing posts and comments by people in your Google Plus circles show up in the search results.
This has raised a hue and cry re' Google contaminating the search results and possible anti-trust violations.

A post on Gizmodo titled "Google just made Bing the best search engine" is encouraging people to move to Bing. I had written earlier about how a sensational headline like "Sitting longer can make your bum bigger" can cause a ripple in the blogosphere with not many stopping to dig deep.  The post on a respected website like Gizmodo would be expected to have a bit more of the technical detail and ideally more balanced.  While the post does mention that with one click you can toggle the personal searches on/off (Fig 1) it could have mentioned that with 4 clicks anyone can disable the default setting of showing/not showing the personal searches.  Thus if you are bothered by the personal search option, just turn it off and you never need to toggle on/off again. Also if you are not signed into Google account, you don't get the personal search option. So why write such a "sensational" article about this?  

Very easy user control to toggle on/off the personal search results.

4 clicks change default preference for personal search

I am all for letting the user make an informed decision.  All Google has done is give the user an additional option.  Is this is potentially useful option?  Let me give you an example.

I have a large circle of educators on Google+ that I have spent time creating.  If I search for an education topic on Google, I would LOVE the ability to have an option to filter the search using this tool.  When I search for "ePortfolio" I get 90 excellent useful personal search results.

Depending on the topic, this is a feature that is incredibly helpful.  Imagine you search for a medication e.g. Viox.  If the future, you could have in your circle people like Eric Topol or Steve Nissen or the Cleveland Clinic.  You can have a choice of seeing their opinions about Viox in the search results.  Why is that an option that we would not give to consumers?

I would hope that at some point we could have an option to include similar personal search filters from FB and Twitter and Yelp or any other similar application on all search engines.  Thus when searching for a movie or a restaurant, I would toggle on the FB filter and when searching on an education technology topic, I could toggle on my Google+ filter.  Till that happens, maybe one can just use Bing for FB filter.
An option is to set up Bing as default search on Firefox and use it to search for movies, and use Google as default search engine on Chrome and use it to search for another areas of interest.  Its easy enough to keep a couple of different browsers running.  It's all about choice and creating smart filters.

As we look at the future, an ability to create such "smart" personalized filters will help you improve the signal:noise ratio and be more efficient in your searches.

Creating beautiful memories with dual monitors

• A lot of us have dual monitors for our computers
• Windows does not have a very good built-in multiple monitor management tool
• When we travel, we take lots of snapshots with our digital cameras but these don't do justice to some of the majestic sights
• Panoramic shots would be great but we don't all have appropriate lenses
• Mobile phones have built-in apps to help take panoramic shots but they cannot match a good camera for results on individual photos

So....

How can we take great high resolution panoramic snapshots and then make them a desktop image spanning 2 monitors?

Step 1.

Take panoramic shots with your camera overlapping successive frames while keeping the camera level and without changing the settings as you swivel left to right to capture the vista.  A suggestion I have is to try and set up the camera to enable the tallest structure in the panorama to be captured.  You don't want to change the field of view in the middle of the panorama.  In addition, wait till there are no moving people in the field of view.  Otherwise you will capture the same person in two or more frames if s/he moved while you were taking the shots or get "chopped off" as in the photo below.

At Chichen Itza

Cropped image

You will also need to do some centering, straightening and cropping of the stitched image. With some efforts you can convert the above image to look like this:

Step 2.

Download the pics to your computer and use Hugin [http://hugin.sourceforge.net/] to stitch these together.  I posted about this earlier.  Lifehacker has a great post on this. Hugin is a free utility with great features.  It has a bit of a learning curve but well worth the efforts.

Step 3.

Use Display Fusion [http://www.displayfusion.com/] to load the panorama you created in step 2 and span it across 2 monitors. Display Fusion is a free download (though there is a premium version with more features).  (Macs apparently have this functionality built-in and don't need this tool).

So there you go, 2 free apps to make your vacation memories stay alive on your dual monitors.  All you have to do is remember to take overlapping photos with your camera while keeping the camera settings constant.  The rest you can do when you get home!

Here are some other panoramic shots:

Backyard

Soccer fields

Providing health care In The Wild! Technology on a shoestring budget.

Students in our medical school have since 2009 "adopted" a village in rural Peru.  They go there for a month at a time accompanied by faculty members to provide various health services.

While there are many challenges, technology is a big help.

One key challenge was to learn about the population and document this and pass it on to the next group of students using an Electronic Medical Records system.  This would help them plan on bringing appropriate supplies e.g. eye glasses, education material etc.

Solution:
OpenMRS:  This is an excellent, robust open source electronic medical records system that was developed out of a partnership (Regenstrief Institute @ Indiana University and Partners in Health).  This is available here.
It lets you create custom fields, forms and reports.  We wanted to capture the data at the point of care at the clinic where we would work.  This would save the time of entering data from paper forms to the database and hopefully decrease errors.
  One problem we have in rural Peru is a reliable power supply.  So we decided to create an ad-hoc wireless network using a laptop as a Server or host and tablet computers as the data entry devices.  The plan is to take some extra extended batteries for the laptop so it can run constantly for about 8-10 hours and the tablets should last for at least 6-8 hours if we don't use them for anything else.  We would charge everything overnight at the hotel be set for the next day at the clinic.

iPad (on right) connected to Laptop (Hosting ad-hoc network)

Another challenge is language - the folks there speak Spanish.

Solution:
The students and faculty are getting a crash course in Spanish from some of the students who are quite fluent in this.  Luckily there is a free medical Spanish app

Another challenge is checking the visual acuity so we can give the correct eye glasses.  We have an ophthalmologist in the group who is training all the students.  But getting them to learn refraction using retinoscopy may not be feasible.

Solution:
Just saw this amazing video of a $2 device that can be attached to a smartphone that lets you measure the refractive error in a few seconds.  Am hoping to get in touch with the genius inventor to see if we can get one or two of these devices to help the cause.

It is quite amazing how we are getting to a point where the portable devices are going to be able to change the world - a model where the health care provider goes to the patient rather than the other way around!  This may seem like something we need in rural and underserved areas in third world countries but why can't we use this right here in the US?  Is it because of our financial models or the legal system?